Monday, April 21, 2008

If You Don't Work You Don't Eat

Ah, but how efficiently does one work?

Pha! "Work." That's such a 1940's concept. Stupid old fashioned Americans. What did they know! Them and their chivalry and Cary Grantishness and being warmongers fighting Hitler and all. If they just would have just let Hitler and the peaceful Germans be and held a candle light vigil everything would have worked out fine anyway. They probably thought working hard and only spending within their limits was some kind of "living" or lifestyle. Why waste time fighting nazism when there's American Teen Idol on and we can go get a HELOC to afford my trip to Paris and SUV?

(Seriously, I'm half tempted at times to just grab an assault rifle and go "prune" the population.)

These statistics are a little bit misleading, because they calculate the average working hours of ALL workers, whether they work full-time or part-time. Because countries like Germany and Japan have many part-time workers, they end up in the middle or at the bottom of the range.

So the main thing this statistic shows is that certain countries are unable to provide full-time jobs for everyone.

Your remark about pruning the population is inappropriate. The whole idea of capitalism is that the only way one person can profit is by doing something that benefits someone else. (eg, a computer programmer can only make money if other people like his software enough to pay him for it.) So talking about forcibly killing innocent human beings (or doing anything else to them against their will) runs counter to capitalism. A remark like that would be much more at home on "captaincommunism.com" or "captainnazism.com" or some other website advocating a form of statism with a history of mass murder. It doesn't belong on a site that supports the most benign, peaceful and edifying socio-economic system in human history.

Now, I know that you know this. I know that you would never actually go postal on your fellow Americans. But there are plenty of people out there who don't know this. There are people out there who have such a poor understanding of capitalism that they honestly thing it is comparable to nazism. And remarks about pruning the population with an assault rifle only give them more reason to think so.

So be more careful. Don't forget that you're on the side of the good guys here. Don't give your enemies any reason to think otherwise.